The Burning Alphabet
Also by Barry Dempster
POETRY:
Tributaries (1978, editor)
Fables for Isolated Men (1982)
Globe Doubts (1983)
Positions to Pray In (1989)
The Unavoidable Man (1990)
Letters from a Long Illness with the World: the D.H.
Lawrence Poems (1993)
Fire and Brimstone (1997)
The Salvation of Desire (2000)
The Words Wanting Out: Poems Selected and New(2003)
FICTION
Real Places and Imaginary Men(1984, short stories)
David and the Daydreams (1985, children’s fiction)
Writing Home (1989, short stories)
The Ascension of Jesse Rapture (1993, novel)
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Dempster, Barry, 1952-
The burning alphabet / Barry Dempster.
Poems.
ISBN 1-894078-42-X
I. Title.
PS8557.E4827B87 2005 C811’.54 C2005-900403-7
Copyright © Barry Dempster, 2005
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.
Cover art: Goodwin, Betty Roodish, Canadian, 1923 Moving Towards Fire, 1983. Oil, coloured chalks, graphite, water-colour on thin wove paper. 291 × 108 cm. (each sheet); 291 × 324 cm. (installed). Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Purchase, 1985.
With the permission of Galérie René Blouin, Montréal.
The author’s photograph is by Glenn Hayes.
The book is set in American Typewriter, Minion and Officina Sans.
Design and layout by Alan Siu.
Printed by Sunville Printco Inc.
Brick Books
431 Boler Road, Box 20081
London, Ontario N6K 4G6
www.brickbooks.ca
For Karen
ANGEL HUSKY
EXPLICIT
HANDPRINTS
THE DEAD ELM
WHEN THE GODS DON’T LOVE YOU
A SMALL JUNGLE
DETACHED
ANGEL HUSKY
DEER
UNBELIEVABLE, AN OCTOBER POEM
CLOSET
SEX, A WISH LIST
HOW TO FORGET YOU
STORMY WEATHER
ETCETERA
MR. MEMORY
SUBURBAN POET
SICK DAYS
1/ DIAGNOSIS
2/ AFTER READING YET ANOTHER ARTICLE ON DEADLY VIRUSES
3/ MOTHER NATURE
4/SIGNS OF HEALTH
5/ IN CAMERA
6/ LOVE LIFE
7/ THE GOOD OLD FEARS
8/ GUARDIAN ANGELS
9/ SICK DAYS
10/GETTING OUT OF BED
11/MONET’S GARDEN
12/MAPLE FEVER
13/THE MOMENT
14/CHILL
15/MAKING LOVE TO A SICK MAN
16/NEW WORLD
BAD HABITS
BAD HABITS
PLURAL
THERE ARE MOODS
TAKING CARE
FOUR THINGS TO CONSIDER BEFORE COMMITTING SUICIDE
SOCRATES THE CATERPILLAR
SHRIEK
RECOGNITION
EVERYWHERE
THE SANGRE DE CRISTO CLOSED ROAD BLUES
THE CROWD OF HIM
FATHER-LOVE
PRETENDING
DISAPPEARING FATHERS
WINGS
ENLIGHTENED
WHERE?
MISSING PERSON
THE CROWD OF HIM
THE CAT’S MEOW
UGLY BONES
THREE LIVES/THREE DEATHS
ANGER SONG
BAD GUYS
ALL THESE BODIES
THE MAN WHO WON’T PLAY POETRY
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
BIOGRAPHY
Above all, I cherish the explicit:
the green light at the corner
of now and then; the thrust of words
like grab and shout; the alphabetical
listings – albatross, breast, cuneiform
in The Dictionary of Dreams.
In the haze of momentary lapses
I reach for the nearest doorknob.
Coasting the tap from hot to cold.
Such confidence: flicking a switch,
unbuttoning your buttons, expelling a verb.
Even mystery has its sure
things: snakes slithering into new
skins, the closed-closet taste of Brussel
sprouts, abandoned golf balls on the moon.
How perfect those hole-in-one philosophies,
the bluntness of lotteries, the unerring
aim of flash floods, viruses,
missiles of lightning – the moment
gone straight to fate.
It’s only the forgotten or
the never tried who suddenly
die, tripping over an end table,
falling from a window that looked
just like a work of art. It’s those who
don’t know how many cigarettes
they’ve smoked, those who lose themselves
in daydreams of some special place,
those who love the ambiguity
of their deepest feelings, they’re the ones
who quietly dissolve.
The trick is: definitive, stunning
things like brandy, fluorescence, arias,
the hammer of red and blue.
Tie it all into knots: fists and
clots and first impressions, life
at its most infallible.
Feel each finger as it creates
a hand, each heartbeat billowing
a Niagara of the blood, each
thought a circle so round
it makes the moon look slack.
After half-an-hour’s dusty drive from Los Alamos,
and another half-hour climb up a hot cliff
I found myself scrunched inside
a cave the size of a child’s playhouse,
surprisingly warm and damp
as if corpses had started to breathe again.
Paintings on the slippery walls –
square horses, empty circles,
men made of burnt sticks.
And there beside me
a crinkled handprint, fingers spread.
Touch me, I said out loud
startling the miniature echoes
from their long stupors.
My palm and the rock both sweating,
I leaned forward, my flesh
doubling its hardness, smacking
against the wall, shattering
each small grain of loneliness.
Someone long ago touched me back.
Here and now, huddled
in what little is left of Ontario’s fall
I stand by the living room window
palm prints smearing cool grey glass,
a kind of braille. Touch me:
as if someone might actually
drive down this street, make the long
climb out of their warm car
to reach me, lifelines mingling.
Is that a human being
at the window across the street
or just a stick of furniture
pressed too close to an empty curtain?
Over here, I wave, all those years of me
gathering into one small act.
After a lonely day, I lay a hard hand
on the place where my heart
chisels away at rock.
This fumbled stroke, another
smudge lost in the blur.
In certain moonlight, the dead elm
is Kabuki, bark the colour
of a wet ghost, branches flourishing
shadows like sleeves, a creature
towering over my small roof
and measly chimney. How easy to
crush me in the middle of the night
when my good dreams and bad dreams
are symbols of unlived life.
Take it down, my nervous friends
advise, call the tree mortician.
Okay, I think, let rabid bats hang
upside down in someone else’s brain.
I’ll watch as all the stranded cats,
the ones with rheumy eyes and ripped ears,
tear fallen sparrows’ nests to shreds.
Shouts of Timber like a heart surgeon’s
thumps, as the old fellow loses
limb after limb. I picture
those neat Stonehenge piles of
firewood bleached bone by the sun.
But would I truly be safe
with the dead elm tumbled down and
just the sky above me, the voice of
Chicken Little ringing in my ears?
People die in their sleep, untouched,
airplanes crashing out of nowhere,
no survivors in the end.
The tree and I, we keep track
of one another’s rot, neither
living nor dying alone, sharing
the paleness of midnight when
the grass is sound asleep and the ants
are inventing the miniature wheel.
On the day Clytie declassified
the contents of her heart
she lay down in the dirt,
dew-smeared, her toes digging
ten diminutive graves.
The romantics claim
she turned into a sunflower,
her will to live collapsing
into soft golden heaps.
Hope shut down, disappointment
curled in the blackness of her breast
like a dead seed. It would have been
wiser to have loved herself
instead of faithless Apollo,
embracing her own shadow
as it climbed the garden wall.
When I realized that none
of the gods loved me either,
I simply dusted off my desire
to die and went inside.
I lit a fire in the first available emptiness,
arranged a bit of comfort
to go with the warmth, curtains and mirrors,
all the choices I could imagine,
all the details someone else might neglect.
Instead of flowers in a vase, I set out
a display of bones, tiny white ones
picked from the fist of my heart.
Despite those dapper pink and green spikes
the dracaena looks edgy
in its flimsy plastic pot,
the lonely anxiety of the too tall.
So I add an asparagus fern
to my flourishing shopping cart.
Not truly belonging to the fern family
it greets the dracaena
all tendrils and want.
Past the pomp of hibiscus blooms
and rows and rows of fledgling poinsettias,
I spot my next purchase,
a straggly spider plant
gesturing everywhere, to no-one.
Lastly, a sturdy terra-cotta pot
large enough for everything.
We will all live together, a small jungle.
What I’m longing for is family,
not the one I’ve got, not the mother
wilting away from lack of memory,
not father with his touch-me-nots of misery,
not the only child make-believe
of bigger brothers or Little Shop of Horror pets,
but constellations, encyclopedias,
English gardens competing for light,
for blossoms and shrubbery, somewhere
I can squeeze into the thick of belonging.
This morning, as every morning,
the a.m. shows stunned me
with their peculiar shade of hope,
people in the prime of their desires.
I want to be king,
said a man up for public office,
at least his eyes said so,
shimmering blue crowns.
To be a star,
echoed an actress in a supporting role.
Want upon want, layers of it
like a high-rise box of chocolates.
To be happy, crooned a model,
a brand name floating across her face.
Just because my wants are off-camera
doesn’t mean I’m satisfied.
Unprotected from those garish TV rays
my skin goes pink,
a squirmy sort of colour
clashing with everything I wear or think.
In the shower I’m suddenly gripped
by an overwhelming wish
to be someone else.
I want to be a mogul, or an astronaut,
I sputter at the God of Seldom There.
A little someone lives inside of me
who will never be invited on an a.m. show.
Every now and then he feels like friction,
sandpaper rubbed against my heart.
Other times, he’s so quiet,
we don’t feel much of anything.
For ten minutes yesterday
I was cosmically loved, not
by some vision of smoke-thin wrists
curling in the November mist,
not from a memory blown in my face
in a puff of witch-doctor dust,
not even from one of those I-feellike
the-last-man-on-earth encounters
with God. No, it was a simple
out-of-bounds, a sticky flurry of
sopping leaves, a sudden leap:
one blue eye, one gold, dividing
me into soul and precious body.
It looked like Siberian Husky,
though it thundered like a waterfall,
soaking me with approval,
circling until I was ringed with
afterglow, my jeans streaked with paw-print
comets. If ghosts had tongues like
post-coital penises, then that pounce
of wet fur was a four-star phantom.
There was nothing I could do but
open my arms, like hugging a
cosmic flood, holding nothing back.